AP Photo/Michael Sohn Supporters hold posters as German Chancellor Angela Merkel returns on the stage at the headquarters of the Christian Democratic Union CDU in Berlin. T his Sunday, September 24, Germans went to the polls to elect a new Bundestag. The preliminary results confirm predictions that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU; and its Bavarian partner Christian Social Union) would come in first, with about one-third of the vote, but this is down about 8 percentage points compared with four years ago. The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), led by Martin Schulz, turned in its worst performance since World War II , with just over 20 percent of the vote. The SPD thus becomes the latest victim in the collapse of center-left establishment parties nearly everywhere. In the May presidential election in France, the French Socialists also turned in their worst performance since their founding and have been forced to put their party headquarters up for sale...

AP Photo/Christophe Ena French President-elect Emmanuel Macron waves to the crowd during a campaign rally in Chatellerault. L ast Sunday, Emmanuel Macron became the eighth president of France’s Fifth Republic. It was a stunning victory, with Macron grabbing two-thirds of the vote against his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen. Yet skeptics have claimed that Macron’s triumph was not really a victory at all but rather an expression of fear of the extremist alternative. Macron therefore has no mandate, claim the nay-sayers, and his presidency will soon succumb to the various forms of conservatism and resistance that doomed his two predecessors, François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy. This analysis ignores the extent to which Macron’s victory has destabilized the French party system. He won the presidency without the support of an established political party. That has never been done before. Neither of the major parties, the Socialist Party of incumbent President Hollande nor the Republican...

In the first round of the French presidential election, voters shocked everyone by doing exactly what the polls predicted they would do. Round two will make 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron the youngest French president and the first not to be a member of one of the two major parties.

AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti Ballots are counted by volunteers for the first-round presidential election at a polling station in Paris, Sunday, April 23, 2017. U p to the final minute, the world watched in suspense. Would French voters stun everyone, as British and American voters did in 2016? In the final weeks the polls had tightened to the point where no one could say what the outcome would be. But in the end the pollsters proved to be spot on: Emmanuel Macron came in first, with 23.7 percent of the vote, and Marine Le Pen second with 21.9. This result makes a Macron victory in the second round almost certain: no poll has put Le Pen within 20 points of him in a head-to-head contest. The next president of France will therefore be, without a doubt, a 39-year-old centrist technocrat who staunchly supports the European Union. Yet this was supposed to be the year of populist revolt, rejection of globalization, and disdain for external constraints on national economic policymaking. What...

Samuel Boivin/Sipa USA via AP Images Jean-Luc Mélenchon gathered about 130000 people in Paris for a large gathering of "La France Insoumise." J ust as the French presidential race appeared to be settling into a comfortable two-person contest, with polls showing Marine Le Pen in a dead heat with Emmanuel Macron in the first round leading to a comfortable (and comforting) Macron victory in the second, the previously moribund left of the Left discovered that what Marx called “the old mole ”—popular discontent well-concealed in its underground lair—still has some life left in it. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who had been languishing at around 12 or 13 percent in first-round estimates, well behind the front-runners at around 24 percent each, suddenly began rising. He is now at 18 or 19, even with or slightly ahead of the right-wing Republican candidate François Fillon and within striking distance of the front-runners, and thus with a slim but real chance of making it into the May 7 runoff. Who is...